Here’s the coronavirus death toll through May 25. After due consideration, I ended up removing Switzerland and Spain from the set of charts and adding Brazil and Colombia. Switzerland got the axe because it’s small and seems to be well under control (i.e., uninteresting for our purposes going forward). Italy and Spain are pretty similar, but someone suggested that since Italy was the first of the European countries to explode it would be interesting to follow them all the way to the bitter end. That sounded reasonable to me.
Of the South American countries, Brazil is an obvious choice because it’s huge and has a lunatic president who seems to think Brazilians are naturally immune to viruses or something. Colombia is interesting for the opposite reason: its president was an early and aggressive advocate of strict quarantine measures. Colombia is also a pretty large country, which makes it a reasonable comparison to Brazil.
NOTE: Whenever I make a large change to the charts, there’s a possibility that I screwed something up. I checked everything against yesterday’s charts pretty carefully, but still, you never know. If you notice something that looks off, let me know and I’ll look into it. (Eagle-eyed observers will note that some of the charts look slightly different today, but that’s because I fixed an old error. The current charts are correct.)
The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.
